“It's just surreal,” says Heather Porter in her office on a sunny spring day. Sunlight streamed through a thin window facing Broad Street, illuminating the awards, diplomas, elegant plants and art, and family photos that crowd her office.

The juxtaposition is clear but casual as if the personal and professional fit hand in glove. Much like Porter herself.

“Dr. Porter is the professor you tell your family about when they ask how your first year of grad school has been,” says Katherine Clauhs, a graduate student in Recreation Therapy. “She’s compassionate, supportive, and cheerful, and her classes are thought-provoking and well structured. Her achievements and experience are a little intimidating at first, but then you realize how lucky you are to be her student.”

What Porter – an associate professor of instruction in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences – finds so surreal is that she’s among this year’s six recipients of the Lindback Award, one of Temple’s most distinguished honors. The Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Awards for Distinguished Teaching recognize faculty members who consistently represent teaching excellence in a classroom, laboratory, or clinical setting. Each honoree receives a $4,000 stipend. The honorees were presented with framed certificates at the university’s Faculty Awards Luncheon on April 25.

“Having been at Temple for so long, I've had mentors along the way who have been recognized as excellent professors. And to now be…in that realm is just very humbling,” she says. Porter is a Temple lifer, completing a BS in Therapeutic Recreation (1992) after hearing the call to RT as a volunteer with the Philadelphia Protestant Home – when she was 12 years old. She returned for graduate work at the urging of one of her mentors, John Shank, and joined the faculty 18 years ago as an adjunct. She completed her PhD at Temple and became full-time faculty in 2009. Today she teaches four courses per semester, predominantly in assessment and documentation, physical disabilities, and classes that emphasize evidence-based practice.

“It's a journey that you never fully realize when you're younger. As you get older, you look back on the path of your life and realize where you’ve been, and how it brought you here,” Porter says.

Energized Innovator

As a clinician, Porter served for 14 years at Moss and Bryn Mawr rehabilitation centers. “My clinical background is very helpful in that I can bring real-life situations into the classroom. When you talk about real-life situations with students, they’re more engaged, more interested in what's going on,” Porter says.

“We are fortunate to have many terrific instructors in our department, but Heather has reached a point of excellence in so many areas that I believed she would receive the Lindback Award,” says Professor Mark Salzer, chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, who suggested to Porter that she apply for the award. “And deservedly so. In my nomination letter, I referred to Dr. Porter as the Energizer Bunny of originality in teaching because of her many innovations. She has made 26 substantial course revisions and enhancements since 2010, developed five new courses, and has mentored 23 students on master’s projects and other intensive graduate-level experiences.” Experiencing Heather Porter, it quickly becomes apparent that much of that energy is driven by a desire to serve her students. “I strive to be a dynamic instructor who uses a variety of modalities to impart knowledge to students because people learn in all different ways,” she says.

“But more than that, I strive to be a memorable instructor. When you can leave a student thinking, "That class was so exciting, and I remember that information, and I can see how it applies to practice," that encourages them to do the same for other people.” To listen to her students, she’s hitting the mark. “Dr. Porter is the most positive person I know, and she truly believes in each and every one of her students,” says Recreation Therapy graduate student McKenzie Seaton.

“I moved halfway across the country to attend Temple, and Dr. Porter is that constant reminder that one person really can change the world. Anyone who meets her is better for it.” Undergraduate Zola Filippi says: “I’ve always felt that Dr. Porter is as invested in my education as I am. Her personal and professional insights will stick with me long after I graduate.”

“Beyond being my favorite professor, Dr. Porter is the ultimate example of an amazing woman. No task is too large. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She truly, and I mean truly, wants to see her students succeed,” says undergrad Amanda Duani. “She is so knowledgeable – I mean, this woman is smart. And she never made me feel like anything less than her. Her classes are challenging, but I’ve really learned from her. She inspires me to succeed.”

Educational Leader

Porter’s leadership in research and teaching has spread beyond the Temple community across the field of therapeutic recreation. She created the website RT Wise Owls, a free database of evidence-based information relevant to recreational therapy practice. The site is used by the American Therapeutic Recreation Association and practitioners in 75 countries and is listed as a database at the National Institutes of Health.

“It's been my pleasure to watch Heather evolve, beginning with her performance as an undergraduate,” says Shank, former program director and now a professor emeritus in the department. “Even then she was pushing for teaching and learning to be above the norm.”

Now that she’s got a $4,000 stipend to work with, Porter has started imagining what would most benefit students next. “If I get to dream a little bit, I would love to start a stroke rehabilitation clinic here at Temple, which would allow students the opportunity to work with people in the community and practice the skills they're learning in class under the guidance of a professor,” she says. “I think that it would be a way not only to enhance students' learning but also give more to the surrounding community. What it's going to take to implement that, I don't know yet.”

A more achievable short-term goal, however, may be to add best practice guidelines to the RT Wise Owls site. “Now that we've done a fair share of summaries, journal articles, other literature, the next step would be to start looking at these summaries and pulling them together to develop best practice clinical guidelines,” she says.

The Heart of Recreational Therapy

When asked “Why do you teach?” Porter gets a little misty behind her glasses. She smiles warmly, then becomes serious and reflective. “Teaching is a component of recreational therapy, so education counseling has always been a component of my practice even as a clinician,” she says. “Also, as educators, we have a hand in research as well, which helps to strengthen the field as a whole.” But, she continues, “teaching allows me to have a broader impact. I get to educate all the new therapists who are going out into the world. They're going to touch the lives of many, many people. So being able to infuse some of my own knowledge and experience into that assists them in making a bigger change in the world.”